


Post-Traumatic Bake Disorder

by TheDreamingSpires



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Multi, alternate universe - basically everyone is russian, because I'm lazy and can't describe accents, chewie the cat, gratuitous say yes to the dress references, when carol gets her movie this'll probably be so ooc
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 12:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9180763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDreamingSpires/pseuds/TheDreamingSpires
Summary: Cookies make the heart grow fonder.aka the 'I know I keep coming to the cookie shop and for some reason it’s always your shift but don’t you dare judge me I need these for my sanity AU'





	

Steve stood behind the counter, running his hands across the laminated wood and humming quietly to himself as he watched the newest batch of commuters hustle away from the train station. He’d always enjoyed people watching, especially early in the morning when everyone was rushing, and so didn’t notice his gaze. People were only really themselves, he had decided, when they thought they were totally inconspicuous, when they thought no one was taking note of them. There was something innocent about that, which Steve was always itching to try and draw, but it never went quite the way he hoped. The harried look of a businessman who had missed the 8:20 and had to catch the 8:31 instead became something akin to anger rather than distress; the college student returning home from the holidays looked depressed rather than resigned. In place of drawing them, he liked to make up stories for the people he saw regularly, giving them names and families, and jobs that they were hurrying off too. It wasn’t quite as good as immortalizing them in his battered old Moleskin, but it was something.

His favourite people by far were the ones that bustled into the shop, eager for a caffeine or sugar hit before they began the daily grind.  These were the people he actually got to speak to, the ones who gave him the occasional tantalizing glimpses into their real lives for him to incorporate into his tales. He didn’t have time to construct the organic, sprawling narratives he favoured for every customer, but a certain few were treated to the full power of his imagination. Not that he would ever tell any of them anything he’d thought up: like the rest of humanity, he was more than happy to be nameless, faceless, a kind barista who gave the most overwrought of his customers a free Danish on Pastry Tuesday.

Steve’s love for people was the main reason he even worked at the shop, considering that he couldn’t create a new cookie recipe to save his life. He could recreate an old recipe perfectly, assuming that all the measurements and instructions were given to him along with the ingredients. Basically, he could follow, like a drone. He left the innovating and the genius to Carol and Sam, crashing around in a kitchen filled with sass, banter and amazing smells. Even from his position behind the counter, separated from the kitchen by two pretty thick walls, Steve could still hear the innuendo war that had been waging since last Tuesday continuing, and could just about smell the almost-ready-for-mass-production Christmas pudding cookies that Carol had insisted on creating to compete with the huge range of festive drinks created by Starbucks and friends. That that she would ever deign even call Starbucks by their name, she preferred ‘corporate evil tosspots’. There was a sane and understandable reason why it was Sam who really dealt with all business enquiries.

The shop had only been open for fifteen minutes, yet two of Steve’s regulars had already breezed through, collecting their usual orders with a smile and a ‘Happy Holidays’. Neither of them were the exciting, interesting regulars, unfortunately. Both suited-up businessmen, they only ever had black coffee and cookies from the health range, boring things with oats and raisins and seeds. To this day Steve marvelled at how Carol and Sam were able to make cookies with nothing even resembling a guilty pleasure in them taste wonderful, but they did. Nevertheless, Steve never chose one when he had his allotted one free cookie a day, instead preferring one of the heavily embellished cookies full of chocolate or mint or toffee. He could remember, with considerable chagrin, the time that one of Carol’s shittiest ex-boyfriends had persuaded her to go on a diet, leaving her with only their most- hipster of chia-seeded offerings on her break.

A little later, the first of Steve’s proper regulars arrived. Statuesque and red-headed, ‘The Russian’ never wore anything less than three-inch heels, even on an icy day. She only had the slightest hint of an accent, and it had taken several months of daily morning chats while he made her coffee for her to finally tell him that she hailed from St Petersburg (which explained the adeptness with which she dealt with the ice, he supposed). Before he’d found out where she come from, Sam had given her the nickname ‘Dominatrix’, but that had never quite felt right to Steve. She didn’t seem like a dominatrix, not that he’d ever met one. Carol had agreed with him, suggesting that she was probably a trophy wife, although he hadn’t been quite sure whether that was because she didn’t like how Sam and Steve stared at her or because she actually believes it.

Today she was wearing a black pencil skirt with a fitted grey shirt, a tailored blazer with sharply pointed lapels hanging casually over her arm. Steve was pretty sure that the sleek handbag she carried was designer, although he couldn’t be sure. Peggy would have known, but then she probably would also have been able to identify The Russian’s job within moments. Steve didn’t let himself get bogged down in thoughts of Peggy, not right now.

“Good morning,” she trilled happily as she came into the shop, old-fashioned bell dinging happily as the door opened and closed.

“Good morning. How was your weekend?” Steve asked conversationally, rolling up his sleeves a little tighter around his elbows in preparation for the morning’s work. The arrival of The Russian was always the start of the morning rush, as she was always the first person off the 7:21am train. She must have run all the way down the platform, and then the entire way from the station to the shop, as she always beat the rest of her fellow commuters by a good ten minutes, resulting in her order being ready just as the others piled through the door. The 7:21 was the first train where people actually came into the shop en masse. Steve always thought that if he could work out why, he could make a fortune. The answer still eluded him.

“Pretty good. My boyfriend and I went to a show on Broadway,” she told him, peering into the display case as she decided which cookie to order.

“Oh, which one?”

“ _Les Misérables_. Clint loved it – I think the rebel inside him really felt a kindred spirit in Valjean.”

“And you?”

“I fell asleep.”

Steve laughed loudly at that, shaking his head from side to side. He’d always had a love for musicals, although generally he found the fun, feel-good ones to be more his speed. He’d discovered a few weeks ago that her boyfriend’s name was Clint, and although he pretended he was as tough as his girlfriend, he was actually a huge softie. Steve hoped that Clint would come in one day, but so far he hadn’t shown up. She had mentioned once or twice that Clint was dying to try the cookies, though, so Steve figured he had a good chance at meeting the enigma that was her boyfriend. They stood in a companionable silence for a second, while The Russian finalised her order, eventually deciding on a Coconut Crunch and a latte.

Steve bagged up her cookie and put a lid on her coffee, smiling and wishing her a good day as she shimmied out of the shop, skirting around a few people who had evidently been on the same train as her as she went through the door. A couple of people did a double take when they saw her, probably wondering, like Steve, how she had got here so quickly.

The next half hour or so went very quickly, with a few of Steve’s other regulars stopping for a chat as their coffee brewed, or while they waited for Sam to high-tail it out of the kitchen with a fresh batch of their most popular offerings. Carol’s cinnamon and pear cookie seemed particularly popular, much to her glee, if Steve was understanding the squeals coming from the kitchen correctly. The tally chart of who had been most successful in creating the most popular combinations had been tilting disturbingly in Carol’s favour lately, and she relished in any extra hard won point, apparently oblivious to whatever the hell was up with Sam at the moment. Usually they would have had more help on hand, but with Christmas quickly approaching Peter had been given extra holiday so that he could spend time with his aunt, and Luke had resigned after the cookies had messed with his waistline too much.

The commuter that marked the end of the morning rush alternated between two very different people. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, the last person through was not actually a ‘commuter’ in the traditional sense. Tony Stark owned the building, and gave the shop a ridiculously cheap lease provided they keep him stocked with their ‘astronomically fantastic’ cookies all year round. Seeing as how he lived and worked in the same building over on the Upper East Side, he had to get his driver to bring him all the way out to the shop, before driving him back to work. Stark still liked to refer to himself as a ‘commuter’, though, even if his commute was one of the most ridiculous things Steve had ever heard of.

Mondays and Fridays saw a huge, dark-skinned man with an eye-patch and a voice that made you stop and listen no matter what he was saying breeze through as the last commuter. Steve didn’t think this guy was a basic brand of commuter either, but he wasn’t very chatty and always managed to turn the conversation onto everyone but him whenever he did speak, often without the other person noticing that he hadn’t shared anything about himself until he’d swept out of the shop, a small smirk on his face.  Today being a Monday, the large man marched in, ordered a cappuccino and a White Chocolate Macadamia Madness, then left, having only uttered four words: good morning, and thank you.

Once the morning rush had died down, Carol and Sam didn’t mind if Steve sat behind the counter and sketched, provided he didn’t ignore any customers (by accident, for course. He just tended to get a bit involved with his art, and miss what was going on around him). Steve sat squarely in the ‘starving artist’ category of art hopefuls. Desperate to get involved in some sort of creative career, Steve had spent his first four months out of the army working for an indie comic book publisher, before being let go when the company went bankrupt and had to close. His next job as one of the poster designers for a local art-house theatre hadn’t gone so well either, as he had had ‘creative differences’ with the director, and been fired after only a month. Feeling pretty disheartened about the whole art scene, and seriously worried about what he was going to do with his life, Carol and Sam had taken pity on him and invited him to join their new enterprise, _Post-Traumatic Bake Disorder_ , a pun on the fact they had both recently been discharged from the air force. Steve had never even met Carol before, and only knew Sam as the only other person who ever spoke during their weekly VA meetings, and yet had taken them up the offer. Sometimes he considered what his life would currently be like if he had followed his first instincts and declined Sam’s offer, but he always managed to shake himself off that line of thought. Honestly, it didn’t bear thinking about.

“What’re you drawing, Cap?” asked Carol, shoving her way through the stable-door that separated the kitchen from the store, huge tray of dark brown cookies balanced precariously in her arms. Steve leapt up from the folding chair he had positioned himself in just in front of the coffee maker, and took the tray off her. Carol’s clumsiness was legendary among the PTBD team. Even though she had been a fighter pilot, one of the best around, her gauge of distances in daily life was terrible, causing her to crash into things on a daily basis. Steve was pretty sure that the only reason Sam had let her live in the apartment above the shop rather than trying to fight her for it was because he was worried about the damage she would do trying to commute to work each day.

“Not much. Just thinking, really.”

Carol smiled at him as she watched him carefully lay down a festive doily before stacking her new batch of cookies in a spare space in the display case.

“Captain Rogers, meet our next best-seller: the Christmas Pudding Crumble. It is a truly fabulous concoction, deserving of every culinary award going. Maybe even a Nobel Prize,” she informed him in her poshest voice, pulling a corner cookie off the baking sheet Steve was still gripping and putting it next to his sketchpad. “Try it when you have a second.”

With that, she went back to the kitchen, leaving a cloud of flour and a trail of crumbs in her wake. Steve smiled affectionately and brushed them up, before going back to sketching. He remembered when Sam had first introduced him to Carol, a live-wire blonde who only stopped talking when specifically asked or when bribed with food. She had mellowed since then, although she still loved to talk, especially about her strangely personable cat, Chewie, who lived in her apartment and occasionally sat halfway down the stairs mewing at Sam and Steve as through trying to have a conversation. Nowadays, Steve counted Carol as among his best friends.

The people who came into the shop between the morning rush and the lunchtime frenzy were different every day. Recently, they’d been getting a lot of hipsters coming in and buying huge boxes of their caffeinated cookies, ranting about how you had to support small businesses in the face of oppression by multinational corporations. Steve had once mentioned to Carol that, on that point, she and the hipsters were in agreement. Memorably, she had hit him on the forehead with her faithful wooden spoon, grumbling menacingly.

Lunchtime brought with it another few regulars, including Carol’s friend Sharon (who would buy anything with pecans in it) and ‘The Scandinavian’, a hulking blonde with some sort of accent and who could give Steve a run for his money in the jovial-but-could-probably-destroy-a-small-building department. The Scandinavian tried something new every day, alongside his regular order of two Super Chocs and an enormous cup of tea. The Scandinavian, according to Steve’s stories, was a building contractor by day, and a superhero by night. Steve could just imagine him running around the neighbourhood, singing his own theme song and saving cats from trees.

Since joining the PTBD team, Steve had filled six sketchbooks, three of which were purely of the people he’d met, although they were far from how he’d have liked them. He had pages and pages of sketches of The Russian, The Scandinavian and others, each done in minute detail with bullet points running down the side, explaining his story of their life. On slow days, he drew Sam and Carol, or men from his old unit. His current fascination was, however, the row of perfectly formed icicles that dangled slightly menacingly from the awning outside. He spent a considerable amount of time studying them, sketching them and shading them, never quite happy with the results. Whenever he got angry with that, he started sketching elements of the shop: the ‘distressed’ wooden stools around the cookie bar (currently in use by a group of the aforementioned hipsters), the long strip of corrugated iron flooring that ran from the door, across the floor and led into the kitchen, which was supposedly there for ‘structural purposes’, but Steve suspected was just a statement feature that Sam wanted to keep.

The lull between lunch and the evening rush was always boring, and Steve usually took the opportunity to have his daily cookie ration and go and hang in the kitchen with his friends. The three of them took turns in going to grab lunch from one of the other small, local businesses (whose owners in turn came to buy cookies on a regular basis), meaning that Steve only really had the opportunity to go and have a wander around once every three days. Not that he minded at the moment, when every trip out the door meant a run-in with one of the coldest winters on record.

Later, the three of them sat around the central island in the kitchen, munching away at bagels from Bagel Buster, the deli down the road run by the calmest, quietest, most zen individual that Steve had ever met. Although Steve was good at working with people who refused to argue, debate or even offer a slightly differing opinion, Sam and Carol had spent their first conversation with the man just staring at him in a slightly bug-eyed fashion, completely unused to having someone just smile and nod and try and talk about subjects everyone could agree on.

The last commuter of the day was the same man, all the time. Middle aged and grey haired, always wearing a suit and tie, the man slipped into the shop ten minutes before closing with an apologetic smile. He always ordered a herbal tea, was happy to have any kind of cookie they had left, and always left a good tip. Steve called him ‘The Hitman’, as he was pretty sure the guy had some sort of dark secret.

As a member of the ‘shop-front’ staff, Sam and Carol didn’t expect Steve to help tidy up the kitchen, although he always did, starting the industrial-sized dishwasher every evening while the others disinfected surfaces. By eight o’clock they were finished for the night, all wondering off their separate ways with cheery waves and a ‘see you tomorrow’.

 

***

 

The rest of the week was pretty standard, the same people with the same orders coming in and out. Some of the companies started to close earlier than others, and a couple of the regulars stopped coming in, presumably now on their holidays. The Russian stopped work on the last Wednesday before Christmas, the Scandinavian on the Thursday, and by Friday evening the only regular still around was The Hitman, who bought two cookies on his last day and gave a small wave as he left the shop, wishing them all happy holidays.

The last Saturday before Christmas was one of the few days when the shop was only open until lunchtime, as Sam wanted to go Christmas shopping and Carol wanted to get back to Boston to see her brother. The morning was busy, with lots of people rushing in to buy a box of cookies as last-minute presents, or for a special occasion. None of Steve’s regulars came in, and at 12:30 he started to tidy up. He was just hefting the stools up onto the bar with Sam as Carol danced around the shop singing ‘Last Christmas’, when the bell over the door jingled happily.

“Are you closed?” asked a woman’s voice, and Steve turned to see the unmistakeable face of The Russian peering through the small gap she had made in the door. The frosted glass made it hard to see, but Steve could just about make out more people standing behind her.

Steve looked at Sam, who just shrugged. Carol was still dancing in the corner, completely impervious to judgement from strangers. “Not quite yet,” Steve replied with a warm smile, ducking behind the counter. “What would you like?”

The Russian opened the door properly, and strode into the shop. She was wearing a long, black tailored duffle coat today, black high heels clicking satisfyingly on the iron strip as she approached the counter. Behind her, three more people came in, two men and a woman.

“What’ve you got left?” The Russian asked in reply, then gestured to her friends. “I’ve been telling these guys all year that they have to try your cookies, but they’re all lazy and couldn’t be bothered to come without me dragging them. We made plans to come for opening, but then Pietro overslept.” She pointed accusatorially at the shorter of the two men (who was still probably over six feet), who waved at Steve with a sheepish grin.

“No worries,” said Sam, coming to stand next to Steve at the counter as Carol sidled through the door back into the kitchen. “I’m assuming your one of Steve’s regulars?”

The Russian laughed and nodded, before holding out her hand to shake. “Natasha Romanoff. I’m assuming you’re the baker of the amazing cookies?”

“One of them. Sam Wilson.” Sam shook her hand, and smiled back.

While Sam and Natasha (Steve quickly changed her name in his mind) discussed the weather, and whether or not they were going anywhere nice for the holidays, Steve looked at her friends. The man who she had called Pietro was standing very close to the other woman, peering over her head into the display case. His hair was blonde, but so pale that under fluorescent lighting it shone silver. The small woman had long, tumbling brunette curls that contrasted amazingly with her long, red, woollen coat. They looked like a nice couple, complete contrasts in colouring, yet something similar in the mischievous glint in their eyes and their impressive profiles. When the woman saw Steve looking at them, she smiled.

“This place smells amazing. I’m so glad Tasha brought us.” She had a stronger accent than Natasha, although it still sounded Russian.

“I can’t take any credit for that, I’m afraid. Sam and Carol do all the baking, I just do the selling.”

The woman smiled, then turned to Pietro. “Don’t you feel guilty for almost making us miss this?”

“It wasn’t deliberate, I promise. I was just tired,” Pietro replied, smiling at the woman like a small child smiles at a parent when they know they’ve done something wrong. His accent was more like Natasha’s, only appearing on certain words.

“We know it wasn’t deliberate, Pietro. You’d never deliberately miss food, especially food someone else is paying for,” the other man said, punching his friend lightly on the shoulder as he approached the counter, crowding the small woman into the display case.

Steve hadn’t really paid much attention to the other man when he’d come into the shop. He was wearing a non-descript jumper and jeans, slightly scuffed Converse on his feet. His phone was sticking out of one of his front pockets, and Steve was pretty sure that he had been texting up until now. Folded over his arm was a long duffel coat and a tartan scarf, although he had kept his gloves on. Was this Clint? Steve hoped so. The guy was gorgeous: as tall as Steve and about four times as tanned, he had the kind of hair that always looked scruffy, but in a good way. His fringe hung slightly in his face, but he left it there, as though it didn’t bother him. Natasha seemed lovely. She deserved someone equally nice (although Steve couldn’t quite picture this guy being a closet musical fan). As Steve appraised the man, Carol peered back at the group through the top-half of the stable door. She noticed Steve’s appreciative gaze, and broke out in an impish smile, disappearing back into the kitchen. Steve wondered absently what she was up too.

Pietro huffed and folded his arms, slouching a little. “I burn a lot of calories, okay? I have to keep my strength up.” Steve was pretty sure he was just acting grumpy though, as he snapped out of it pretty quickly when Carol came back into the room, carrying a huge baking tray covered in a variety of different cookies.

“Sadly, guys, we’re out of our regular, nice looking stock,” she announced as she placed the tray on the counter, leaning back on the cash register and workspace behind her, and assessing the group stood in front of her. “However, we have here a variety of slightly dodgy looking specimens. They may look a bit odd, but I think that makes them taste even better. Take as many as you want – Steve’ll only eat them otherwise, and we wouldn’t want to damage his perfect physique.” As she spoke she poked Steve in the stomach, immediately hitting a layer of muscle straight under his shirt. She wasn’t making eye-contact with him, but rather watching maybe-Clint’s reaction after his attention had been deliberately drawn to Steve’s not-unimpressive frame. Whatever she saw, it made her smile.

“Of course we wouldn’t want to do that,” joked Natasha in response. “Then where would I go for my daily dose of all-American beefcake?”

“Careful, Nat. What would Clint say?” asked maybe-Clint, pulling his hands out of his pockets and throwing an arm around Natasha’s shoulders.

Apparently, maybe-Clint wasn’t Clint at all, and that made Steve happier than it should have. Now he knew that he wasn’t checking out one of his friend’s boyfriends (Natasha was a friend, wasn’t she? In the loosest sense of the word, definitely), Steve properly looked at the man standing across from him. His clothes sat snugly against well-honed muscle, fabric strained a little over a six-pack that could only have been formed over years of care and attention. For some reason, he still had his gloves on.

“What Clint doesn’t know, can’t hurt him,” she replied, digging in her bag to produce her purse. “How much do we owe you?”

Sam opened his mouth to speak, but closed it as Carol stamped on his foot. “On the house, for such a regular customer.” Sam grumbled a little, but still stooped to grab a handful of bags, and dropping the cookies in, creating a mixture of flavours in each bag.

“Are you sure, we really don’t mind…”

“Thanks a lot!” interjected Pietro, grabbing a bag off the counter and sniffing its contents. “Happy Holidays!”

Pietro’s friends decided that this was the end of the argument, all picking up their bags and shouting goodbyes before leaving the shop, the small woman pulling out a cookie and starting to nibble on it as she left.

 

***

 

A few hours later, and Steve was lying on Carol’s couch, staring at the television screen and stroking Chewie, who had curled up on Steve’s chest over an hour ago and didn’t seem to be planning on moving. From his position in the middle of the living room, Steve could see Carol by the front door, collecting a pizza from the delivery boy. Once she had handed over the money, she closed the door, wandering back into the living room and collapsing in her favourite armchair.

“What’re you watching?”

“Hmm?”

“What’s on TV?”

“Oh, umm. The news, maybe?” Steve tried to focus on the screen, but his brain was moving too slowly to work out what was going on. “Could you pass me a slice of pizza?”

Carol dropped a few slices on a plate, and dumped it on Steve’s chest on her way to the kitchen to get drinks. “What’re you thinking about, dream boy?”

“Nothing much. The holidays, I guess. What I’m going to do while you guys are away.”

“I’ve already told you that you can come back to Boston with me,” Carol harrumphed in reply, adding two glasses of water to the pile of magazines and newspapers already on the table.

“And watch you fight with your dad and make your mum cry? Sam told me what it was like last year. Thanks but no thanks, Hamburger.”

Steve had never quite understood why Sam called her Hamburger, but after knowing Carol for a few weeks, he’d realised the name suited her, and took up the habit himself.

“I’m only going to see my brother this year. We’re going to meet up at a diner or something for milkshakes. It’ll be fun – you’ll love Joe. He’s does a great impression of Batman.” Carol bit into a slice of pizza, eating almost a whole slice in one go.

Steve laughed as she licked sauce off her lips, continuing to scratch the cat behind the ears. “That’s still a no, but again, thanks for the offer.”

Carol looked doubtful, and continued her attack on the pizza. She was silent for a few minutes, sucking melted cheese off her fingers as she watched Steve hug her cat. “I bet I can guess what you were thinking about,” she baited suddenly, face hidden behind her glass and distorted by the water.

“What?”

“Mr Sexypants.”

“Who?” Steve snorted, narrowly avoiding meeting his death at the hands of his water.

“Six foot two, brown eyes, glove fetish that could rival Elsa’s? Ring a bell?”

“Who’s Elsa?”

Carol snorted in derision, swirling the water in her glass. “Don’t pretend. I know you’ve seen _Frozen_ , and you loved it. Sam tells me stuff too. Also, stop trying to distract me. You know who I’m talking about.”

“Natasha’s friend? He seemed nice.” Steve was a past master at changing topics when it came to Carol, although he was loathe to willingly bring up the guy he’d been ogling earlier.

“Nice? Nice?! For God’s sake, Steve, he was gorgeous, and he thought you were too! Why didn’t you do anything? I tried my best to get him to stay and chat, I even gave them all free cookies. I was the classiest wingman you could have asked for, and what did you do? Stand there silently, smiling awkwardly, not even introducing yourself! That’s pretty pathetic.”

“You’re not much better!” Steve argued back, sitting up a little straighter and almost displacing Chewie. “That Pietro guy looked pretty pleased to see you, and you just let him wander off into the great blue yonder.” Steve hadn’t noticed this himself, exactly, but Sam had been muttering about it earlier as they emptied out the display case.

“That, my dear Steve, is because I have someone else in mind. You, however, are in the middle of a dry spell similar in scope to the Sahara. You should have acted on the chemistry, and now he is lost.” Carol gave him a sorrowful glance. “Ah, well. Maybe next time.”

Steve grimaced at her, finally starting to eat his own pizza. He knew he was a little socially inept when it came to romance – whenever he went out with Sam it always became painfully apparent that he had no idea what to say, neither to guys nor girls. Something always made him second-guess himself, and by the time he had psyched himself up enough to actually say something witty, the moment had always passed.

He finished his first slice of pizza in silence, and nabbed another one without disturbing Chewie, who didn’t seem to be planning on moving anytime soon. Suddenly remembering something, he whipped his head around to fix his gaze on Carol. “Who’s this _someone else_ you have in mind, then?”

Carol looked at him with narrowed eyes for a moment, then relaxed back into her chair with a smug smile that seriously rivalled that of her cat. “Not telling.”

“Seriously?” Steve sat up a little bit, still careful not to disturb the cat. “You want to judge my lack of moves, and then you’re not going to share your own romantic endeavours?” He took a bite of pizza and levied a disappointed look at her. “I thought we were closer than that.”

“If you don’t stop that puppy-dog look in one moment, Rogers, I swear to God…” Carol’s threat trailed off as Steve’s sorrowful eyes widened to comic levels, and they both dissolved into laughter.

“I just want to know who it is so I can give them the ‘hurt her and you die’ talk. I promise I’ll be nice. Pinky-swear.”

“And I just want you to be _happy_ , you big lump. While I love that you’re happy to take part in an innocent, sex-free Netflix and chill session with me and the one true love of my life, equally I want you to find someone great who you want to do _actual_ Netflix and chill with.” Carol accentuated several words in her speech with a wave of her slice of pizza.

“Firstly, the fact that you call your cat the ‘one true love of your life’ doesn’t paint you in the best light. You are way too young and pretty to be a cat lady yet,” Steve began, pretending to ignore her mutter about ‘cat lady’ sounding like a pretty sweet deal. “Secondly, have you been asking Peter to teach you to be ‘down with the kids’ again?”

“Peter and I have a deal that benefits us both,” Carol informed him, standing up to get herself a refill and grabbing his cup on the way past. “I buy him the comics his aunt won’t let him have, and he teaches me his teenage ways. My brother is going to –,” she trailed off as she came back out of the kitchen, pointing at him menacingly with her glass of milk. Sometimes, Steve really worried about how many mannerisms Carol and Chewie shared. “We should make a deal!”

Steve continued eating his pizza, trying to look as nonplussed as possible. “What?”

“You and I!” she squealed, jumping up and down in her seat. “About romance! I don’t want you to become a grumpy old bachelor who shouts at kids to get off his lawn, and you don’t want me to become an old cat lady!”

“If I ever become fiscally stable enough to afford a house with a lawn in this area, I can assure you I won’t be grumpy. Unbearably smug, yes. Grumpy, no.”

Carol chose to ignore him, and continued on in a slightly louder voice. “We can help each other, be symbiotic or whatever!”

“You want me to chat up the guy you have a thing for?” Honestly confused, Steve sat up straight, carefully moving Chewie onto the cushion next to him and receiving an indignant mewl for his pains.

“No! We can make one of those rom-com pacts. If we’re both still single when we’re forty, then we get married, and buy a house with a lawn. Maybe let Sam live in the garage, assuming he’s willing to pay rent and babysit the kids. And by kids, I mean cats. So many cats.”

Steve stared at her for a moment, then started laughing. “You literally just said that this was to avoid you becoming an old cat lady!” he pointed out, his mind still spinning. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about the possibility of him and Carol in the past. She was beautiful, and hilarious, and blunt, and fiercely loyal, basically everything that caught his eye. Yet, something about them had never clicked. From the moment Sam had introduced them, and her self-introduction had included a large part of Queen’s _Bohemian Rhapsody_ for no apparent reason, Steve had known that they were going to be friends, but never more than that. Maybe it was because she could handle hotter chilli than him, or because she insisted on pausing her morning jog every single time she saw a dog, but neither of them had ever wanted to try anything romantic.

Not that the dog thing was an issue, of course. Steve got distracted by dogs all the time. The main disconnect came with the way Carol ignored the owners to roll around on the floor making baby noises with their pets, where Steve felt he had to actually make some semblance of small talk. Embarrassingly, Carol still came away with way more phone numbers and hopeful ‘call me’s that he ever did.

“Old cat ladies are crazy spinsters. Married ladies with lots of cats are respectable members of the community. I’ll just be using you to give myself an aura of social acceptability,” she stuck her tongue out at him, because sometimes she was about five. “So there.”

“I suppose I could do worse,” Steve began with a grin, tickling Chewie as he pretended to check Carol out. “Child-bearing hips and all that.”

“I’d like to see you do better!” she shook her hair over her shoulder, and did her best swimsuit model pose, despite being dressed in her rattiest tartan pyjama pants and a top that read ‘Oh for fox sake’ with a picture in place of the ‘fox’.

“You’re on, Danvers,” he replied after a moment’s further hesitation. “Seeing as how I’m younger than you,” he laughed as she hissed ‘two months’ in response, “on my fortieth birthday, if neither of us is attached, I’ll propose to you in the most embarrassing way I can think of, and we can become viral YouTube sensations and make Sam and Peter proud.”

“Make the proposal cat-themed and I’m all yours.”

“Deal.”

They spent the rest of the evening gorging on pizza and brownie mug-cake, hurling insults at the overly picky brides on _Say Yes to the Dress_ , and joking about their own wedding.

 

*** 

 

Steve woke up far later the next day than he had intended. He had eventually stumbled home in the early hours of the morning, full of pizza and covered in cat hair. He hadn’t even bothered to change, or set his phone alarm, leaving him already two hours behind schedule on his planned day for Christmas wrapping. Thank God, he had already finished all his Christmas shopping, or else he would be going insane. He seriously considered texting Sam words to that effect, but decided that that would likely reduce the chances that Sam would finally give him the bread sauce recipe he had been hankering after for the last four years. Mildly irritated by his own tardiness, he clambered out of bed and wandered into his bathroom, deliberately avoiding the mirror as he got into the shower. Late nights with Carol never made for particularly good-looking mornings.

As Steve lathered up his hair, his hands encountered something papery and sticky. He frowned and untangled it, eventually coming away with a nearly-pulped sticky label bearing the words ‘Mr Carol Danvers’. With a groan, he tossed the label onto the bathroom floor, listening to it hit the floor with an unappetising slap. Had he really come home last night with a sticky label in his hair? He hoped not. He was judged enough by the people in his building as it was, he didn’t want to make it any worse.

Once he’d finished his shower, he went back into his bedroom and fished his phone out from inside the jeans he’d been wearing last night. It was on 5% battery, far lower than he normally liked to risk, and so he padded into the kitchen to put it on charge as he made his coffee. When he went back to check it, he found a stream of texts from Sam and a string of Snapchats from Carol.

_From: Sam (14:11)  
WHAT ARE YOU GETTING CAROL????_

_From: Sam (14:32)  
I’m getting alcohol. Shotgun being the boring alcohol-giver._

_From: Sam (14:34)  
WHAT DOES SHE DRINK??????_

_From: Sam (14:41)  
She’s getting bourbon. She can always re-gift._

_From: Sam (14:59)  
Aren’t you with her, asshole? CAN’T YOU JUST ASK HER????_

_From: Sam (15:02)  
Screw you, Rogers. You’re getting a re-gift this year._

After that was total radio silence, which Steve assumed meant he wasn’t Sam’s favourite person right now. Steve had always had a knack for guessing what gifts to get people, but with Carol it wasn’t even difficult. She accepted any form of cat memorabilia with barely contained glee, and loved socks more than any person on Earth. Essentially, she was the person that weird gift concessions were built for. Sam was just as easy, as he was always happy with something that showed thought. Last year, Carol had collected together personalised ‘Sam’ containers of Nutella, Coke and peanut butter, and he had been thrilled.

As Steve chuckled at Sam’s panic, he opened Carol’s Snapchats. The first was a selfie of her, sitting at the gate at the airport, looking disgusted. Her caption read _‘flight delayed’_ , followed by the shocked emoji that was her default reaction to everything. The next was a close-up of the departures board, showing her flight to Boston as delayed. The final one was her on gangway into the plane, looking like the cat that got the cream, captioned _“so long, suckers”_ along with the smug grin emoji. Steve shook his head fondly, and returned to caffeinating himself.

 

An hour and a half later, and Steve had finished his wrapping. He didn’t have much to do, as the only people who he really needed to give gifts to were Sam and Carol. Peter and his college buddies all got cards or gift vouchers, which hardly needed much decoration. As he sat in the pile of gifts, he suddenly felt a bit bereft, realising that this was the sum-total of people in the world who he cared about, and who cared about him in return. With Carol out of town and Sam presumably in a black hole of gift-giving misery, his contact book suddenly looked very empty. He continued to thumb through the recent texts on his phone listlessly for a moment, before deciding on one and tapping it.

“Well if it isn’t Captain America himself.”

“Tony, hi. I was wondering if you had any plans tonight? Fancy doing something?”

“Oh, Captain, my Captain,” he paused dramatically. “What kind of plans are you looking for?”


End file.
